Why Is English Spelling So Weird?
Ever wonder why 'knight' has a 'k' or 'island' has an 's'? The answer isn't that English is illogical, but that its spelling is a fossil record of its turbulent…
Unlocking the Universe of Languages
Ever wonder why 'knight' has a 'k' or 'island' has an 's'? The answer isn't that English is illogical, but that its spelling is a fossil record of its turbulent…
In the early days of the internet, a mysterious language called Sadesan appeared, promising a lost branch of the Indo-European family tree. But this convincing tongue, complete with a complex…
Ever wonder why it's 'chai' in Moscow but 'tea' in London? The answer lies not in a dictionary, but on a map of ancient trade. Discover how the overland Silk…
We can read the words of Charlemagne's era, but what did they actually sound like? A groundbreaking initiative called the "Audio-visual corpus of Old German" (AT-ST) is using clues from…
Named after the Cheshire Cat, Cheshirization is a fascinating phonological process where a vowel vanishes but leaves a ghostly trace of its articulation on a neighboring consonant. Like the cat's…
Lithuanian, one of Europe's oldest languages, possesses a fascinating grammatical tool that English lacks: a specific way to talk about things that are just about to happen. This "inceptive" mood,…
Long before English dominated global trade, the language of the Sogdians, an Iranian people from Central Asia, connected the great empires of the East and West. This is the story…
What if the map on your wall was a Rosetta Stone, holding the key to forgotten languages and ancient migrations? The study of toponymy reveals that the names of our…
Imagine a language that vanished over 5,000 years ago, leaving behind no written records. This is Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the mysterious ancestor of English, Russian, Hindi, and hundreds of other tongues.…